simply horrible, windows with social bs integration, great, just ****ing great, when they finish the setup it will probably ask your for facebook acount.

I pretty much agree with this. I just tried windows 8 in a VM and so far I really don't like it from a UI perspective. You have to register a live id account, and then the start menu is removed and replaced with metro, and then metro is littered with social media junk.

Why can't I just have a regular start menu? I really don't like how when I want to launch another program, I have to completely cover up my desktop, not only that but metro is really cumbersome compared to the nice compact classic start menu, and I find it really annoying that you can't manipulate any system settings without metro active.

From a technical perspective windows 8 is great though. A fresh install uses only 10GB, and even in a VM it boots fast, not to mention has a very tiny memory footprint, and some apps, such as the task manager, have been greatly improved.

Also, I don't know if anybody else has noticed, but copying files is FAST. MS has really optimized the crap out of how the OS buffers data for file copying, it even does a better job than linux does now. Not only that, but it has an option where you can see the transfer rate in real-time (no more highly inaccurate estimations that wildly vary.) It takes literally 1.5 seconds to copy a gigabyte file on my setup, and again, that is within a VM which is slower than running on a real system.

That would be awesome if these increased disk I/O speeds would affect games as well.

I pretty much agree with this. I just tried windows 8 in a VM and so far I really don't like it from a UI perspective. You have to register a live id account, and then the start menu is removed and replaced with metro, and then metro is littered with social media junk.

Why can't I just have a regular start menu? I really don't like how when I want to launch another program, I have to completely cover up my desktop, not only that but metro is really cumbersome compared to the nice compact classic start menu, and I find it really annoying that you can't manipulate any system settings without metro active.

From a technical perspective windows 8 is great though. A fresh install uses only 10GB, and even in a VM it boots fast, not to mention has a very tiny memory footprint, and some apps, such as the task manager, have been greatly improved.

Also, I don't know if anybody else has noticed, but copying files is FAST. MS has really optimized the crap out of how the OS buffers data for file copying, it even does a better job than linux does now. Not only that, but it has an option where you can see the transfer rate in real-time (no more highly inaccurate estimations that wildly vary.) It takes literally 1.5 seconds to copy a gigabyte file on my setup, and again, that is within a VM which is slower than running on a real system.

That would be awesome if these increased disk I/O speeds would affect games as well.

the bolded part i'm fine with it, but removing start menu and replacing it with that metro **** i'm not ok with it. Even on phone I can't stand metro, and it simply has no place on desktop.

current start menu is perfect, it only covers about 10% of screen, you can be reading someting online and opening start menu will not prevent you from doing what you were doing before.

Microsoft’s new Metro interface is great for touch but how about keyboard and mouse users?

We’ve put together a few tips and tricks to help you along your Windows 8 way with your traditional desktop. Feel free to comment if you have more and we’ll update the post with a mention and your tip/trick.

To unlock the lock screen, double tap on your mouse or hit any key on the keyboard instead of dragging to the top
To bring up the “charms bar” (share, settings, shutdown, etc), hit the lower-left corner of the screen with the mouse – no clicking required or use winkey+c
In any app, right click to bring up the “app bar” to see everything you can do
To go back to the Start screen, simply use the Windows Key on your keyboard
Bump your mouse against the left side of the screen to see a thumbnail of your most recently used app. Use the scroll wheel to see all open modern apps
Modern apps don’t generally need to be closed — they are suspended when they’re not in view. If you really need to close them, use the task manager (via the tile or ctrl+shift+esc) to force quit
To search for anything on your system like applications, setting, or files, simply start typing from the Start screen, and the search box will automatically pop up or use winkey+f
Glance at your desktop by using Winkey+y
Activate application settings by using winkey+i
Project onto an external TV/monitor using winkey+p
Use the page up and page down keys to move between tile groups on the Start Screen
Bump your mouse to the left and grab an app, if you pull it towards the right and then bump it to the left it will cycle to the next app (Thanks Tom Servo)
Pin/unpin tiles or remove apps by right clicking on tiles on the Start Screen (Thanks @FreddyFuentes)
Activate Semantic Zoom in Metro apps by using Ctrl+ mouse scroll

the bolded part i'm fine with it, but removing start menu and replacing it with that metro **** i'm not ok with it. Even on phone I can't stand metro, and it simply has no place on desktop.

current start menu is perfect, it only covers about 10% of screen, you can be reading someting online and opening start menu will not prevent you from doing what you were doing before.

Why don't you set it to use classic desktop and just not use Metro? If you don't like it just don't use it. I have posted this throughout this thread, and no one does that and come back and report about the other improvements except Alpha.

Am I missing something? I have yet to install it, had to work today but I will soon. Everything I have read said you can completely not use metro if you wanted.

thats good, still a bit worried if MS will remove the normal start menu from final build. or not offer easy way to switch, most consumers will never figure out how to switch it.

That is the point, the legacy UI is going away because, for consumers, hard to use, difficult to understand, not intuitive, and bloated with everything from windows 3.1. With the metro ui, MS will be delivering a simpler, faster, and easier UI experince. In doing so they have the ability under the hood to finally start discarding the extremely old programming interfaces that they have supported since the 80s.
What so many people seem to misunderstand is that the legacy UI is now "just an app" that runs on windows. So much that during installation you will have the option of not installing it.

That is the point, the legacy UI is going away because, for consumers, hard to use, difficult to understand, not intuitive, and bloated with everything from windows 3.1. With the metro ui, MS will be delivering a simpler, faster, and easier UI experince. In doing so they have the ability under the hood to finally start discarding the extremely old programming interfaces that they have supported since the 80s.
What so many people seem to misunderstand is that the legacy UI is now "just an app" that runs on windows. So much that during installation you will have the option of not installing it.

Windows 8 is a great improvement, and it is about bloody time.

haha, current start menu is bloated compared to the metro ****? are you insane? metro is definition of bloated, current start menu takes about 10% of screen, compared to the metro **** is 100%.

hard to understand? haha, bearclaw couldn't even exit the control panel in metro, talk about ****ed up ui.